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BIG PHYSICS, BIG QUESTIONS –

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Controversy is raging in the London Review of Books over whether or
not Margaret Thatcher can be described as a scientist. It started in November
with a review by W. R. Johnson of the great lady’s book The Downing Street
Years, in which Johnson attacked what he called Thatcher’s ‘repeated and
ludicrous vaunting of her own scientific expertise’. By way of example,
he gave this quote from Thatcher about the American Star Wars project, alias
the Strategic Defense Initiative:

‘I kept tight personal control over decisions relating to SDI . . .
This was one of those areas in which only a firm grasp of the scientific
concepts involved allows the right policy decisions to be made. Laid-back
generalists from the Foreign Office – let alone the ministerial muddlers
in charge of them – could not be relied upon. By contrast, I was in my element.’

Johnson’s comment on this was dismissive. ‘The mundane reality,’ he
wrote, ‘is that the young Margaret took a Second in chemistry, briefly worked
in a company where she made the filling for jam rolls, then married a millionaire
and never worked as a ‘scientist’ again. This, apparently, enabled her to
achieve an immediate grasp of the high-energy physics of SDI . . .’

On 16 December, however, Norman Dombey, professor of physics at the
University of Sussex, sprang to Thatcher’s defence in a letter to the magazine.
He insisted that her background in science did indeed enable her to grasp
the technicalities of SDI, and added: ‘It is difficult to imagine her successor
or any of the other management consultants, accountants and lawyers on the
Government Front Bench following her example.’

An interesting point, we thought.

* * *

Meanwhile there has been a rather different exchange of views in the
pages of Nature: the great tea scum debate, which previously surfaced here
on 30 October last year. The question this time concerns what forms the
gunky brown bits of scum that stick to the sides of teacups, and what can
be done about them?

Ralph Lewin of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California
gave the answers in the issue of 16 December. The scum comes from lipids
which form the protective waxes on the leaves of the tea plant. These waxes
float to the surface of the beverage, where they are cracked into ‘floes’
when the tea is stirred. As you sip your tea and the level in the cup goes
down, the floes stick to the sides of the cup. Phenolic compounds from the
lipids stain the china, turning brown upon oxidation, and are thickened
by the casein and butterfat in milk.

The simple solution, Lewin says, is to ‘liquefy, saponify and solubise’
the stains – a process known to the rest of us as washing up.

* * *

In November, New Scientist published an article on ‘sentinel chickens’
– fowl that are being pressed into service in Queensland to provide an early
warning of mosquito-borne viruses (This Week, 6 November). So we were interested
to receive a copy of the newsletter of the Florida Mosquito Control Association,
with an article about sentinel chickens showing they have been used in America
for many years. Pleased as we were to discover this, we were even more delighted
by the newsletter’s name. It’s called Buzzwords.

* * *

In Japan, the latest best seller is called The Complete Manual of Suicide.
It provides a handy guide to hanging yourself, poisoning yourself with common
medicines, slashing your wrists, and so on, and has already sold 70 000
copies.

The author is Wataru Tsurumi, a self-styled ‘suicide analyst’, who says
he didn’t write the book to help people top themselves, but ‘to show the
gruesome-ness of suicide and help people live with suicidal thoughts’.

The logic here, presumably, is that potential suicides who read the
book will be so repelled at the thought of the mess they would leave for
someone to clear up that they will be put off doing anything so antisocial.
But Feedback is worried. What if they find the book so gruesome they can’t
live with the images in it, and end up keener than ever to end it all?

* * *

Feedback has discovered some interesting facts about Smarties in Chemistry
Department News, a monthly newsletter produced for the chemists at Imperial
College, London. The newsletter asks readers to imagine a tube of Smarties
so big that the base of it covers London, an area of around 1000 square
kilometres. It then invites guesses as to how high the tube would reach
if every Smartie represented a molecule and it was filled with a mole of
them. One mole of any substance contains the same number of molecules as
there are carbon atoms in 12 grams of the commonest carbon isotope; this,
it so happens, is 6.02 x 1023 molecules.

Give up? Never mind, the newsletter gives us the answer. The tube would
be 662 000 kilometres high, or twice the distance to the Moon.

Now, isn’t that fascinating?

* * *

The frightening thing about the Cabinet records for 1963, released earlier
this month, is how up-to-date they seem. The second item on the agenda for
a meeting in April 1963 was the export of arms to Iraq. The third item was
the ‘export of large diameter steel pipe’.

* * *

Things we hope you did not get for Christmas, number one: a telephone/fax
machine of the same make as the one purchased by a recent caller to Feedback.
Normally a reticent fellow, he seemed unusually loquacious during the call.
Finally, he explained. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I have to keep talking or
this damn thing will turn into a fax.’

* * *

Finally, a correction. Last week we give the wrong mailing address for
those wishing to subscribe to the ‘mini-JIR’ via Internet. The correct thing
to do is to send a message with the words ‘SUBSCRIBE MINI-JIR’, followed
by your name, to LISTSERV@MITVMA. MIT. EDU.